250 ROMANCE LANGUAGES 



contracted by the pressure of German from the north and of Italian 

 from the south. Printed texts exist for only a part of this Ladin 

 territory; for other regions it was necessary to obtain specimens 

 and to outline the grammar of each valley, so to speak, before pro- 

 ceeding to a general account. This great work was the starting-point 

 for a whole series of special studies of smaller scope, local grammars, 

 texts, etc., with the result that the Ladin dialects are now among 

 the best known in the whole field of the Romance languages. In 

 Prof. Ascoli's severe school have been trained a Pleiades of philo- 

 logists, among whom it is enough to name Count Nigra, Messrs. 

 D* Ovidio, Rajna, Ive, De Lollis, Guarnerio, Parodi, Salvioni, and 

 Pieri, scholars who will soon complete for us the work of describing 

 in detail the various spoken dialects of Italy. 



If time permitted, I might show how the study of the literary 

 language of Italy, the Tuscan, has been revived and renewed by the 

 introduction of the new methods. But as I am forced to confine 

 myself to indicating the salient features of the successive phases in 

 the history of Romance philology, I shall now review in a few words 

 what the generation which followed Diez has accomplished for the 

 study of the folk-idioms, the patois. What I have just said about the 

 Archivio glottologico brings me naturally to this subject. 



The first philologists who made the Romance languages their 

 study gave their attention almost exclusively to the languages 

 which we may term official, to those which now serve as the organs 

 of literature and of government. Raynouard, for example, treated 

 only Old Provencal, the language of the troubadours. It does not 

 seem to have occurred to him that the folk-speech of southern France, 

 or, in particular, the patois of Provence, which was the every-day 

 language of his youth, might be worthy of study. Even in Diez's 

 grammar the treatment of the patois is superficial and incomplete. 

 And yet there is no reason why the grammatical peculiarities of a 

 literary language should possess more interest than those of an 

 unwritten one. Time brought a change of attitude on this subject, 

 as was to be expected, and for some thirty years past several experi- 

 enced linguists have turned their attention to the once-neglected 

 patois. The study of a living tongue has one notable advantage 

 over that of a written language the possibility of a greater degree 

 of precision. Only in a living tongue is it possible to distinguish 

 those fine shades of sounds of which writing gives us no hint. We 

 are all aware that the Latin alphabet, even when improved by 

 additional signs, is powerless to represent the vast variety of sounds 

 used in Romance speech. We know that most of the letters of the 

 alphabet have, as we say, several pronunciations they often ex- 

 press very different sounds. As long ago as the thirteenth century, 

 a Provencal grammarian attributed to the e, a, and o two distinct 



